Lisa Frank Is Real

By Katherine Wells

If you are a female born in the 1980s, I don’t need to tell you what Lisa Frank is. In case you are not, Lisa Frank is a wildly popular brand of craft and school supplies featuring kaleidoscopic drawings of unicorns, stars, hearts, teddy bears, and the like.

A lesser-known fact is that Lisa Frank is a real person – and the owner of Lisa Frank Incorporated. Last year, Urban Outfitters bought her vintage stock and the notoriously reclusive Frank agreed to a promotional interview. The UO crew, headed by filmmakers Scott Ross and Karl Beyer, got a tour of Frank’s headquarters, which are even crazier than your childhood self could have imagined. The resulting video features a glimpse into the fireproof vault full of every Lisa Frank product ever sold, a giant fanmail wall, a dancing bear, and many quotable lines from Frank herself (“I’m a lunatic,” she says).